Sneak peek: Corona 10
Chaos Czech has released a sneak peek video for Corona 10, the next major update to Corona, its production renderer for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D.
Changes include support for custom sun colours with procedural clouds, better support for scanned materials from Chaos Scans, and proper support for scenes in which the Corona camera is inside volumes.
Updates to procedural clouds and handling of Chaos Scans materials
Corona 10 is still early in development, the previous major release having shipped just two months ago, so many of the changes in the initial sneak peek video are simply updates to features introduced in Corona 9.
The new procedural clouds system now supports custom sun colours, rather than the colour of the sun being determined automatically by its position in the sky, making it possible to create more stylised effects.
With Corona 9, Chaos Czech introduced new Corona Premium subscriptions, which include access to Chaos Scans, its online library of scanned materials.
In Corona 10, CoronaScannedMtl, used to import scanned materials into Corona, gets support for custom bump and displacement maps, and Corona’s triplanar mapping system.
Scanned materials can also now be previewed in the 3ds Max viewport.
Proper handling of the Corona camera inside water and clouds
In addition, the Corona camera now properly detects the surrounding medium, making it possible to create flythroughs of volumes like clouds or smoke, or shots with the camera half in and half out of water.
Rendering of caustics has also been updated, with Corona now automatically adjusting caustics parameters to match the resolution at which an image is being rendered.
Performance improvements include a speed increase of “up to 600x” when using Render Selected to render an individual object from a scene in isolation.
Other scheduled features: initial support for Chaos Cloud, better support for Chaos Cosmos
Other changes listed on Corona’s online roadmap but not shown in the video include unification of the Corona Material Library with online asset library Chaos Cosmos, now included in all Corona subscriptions.
The work should also improve conversion of materials between Corona and Chaos’s V-Ray renderer.
According to the roadmap, Corona 10 will also introduce “initial support” for online rendering system Chaos Cloud, previously only available from within V-Ray.
Pricing, system requirements and release date
Corona 10 is currently available via daily builds. It is scheduled for an official release in May 2023. The current stable release, Corona 9, is compatible with 3ds Max 2016+ and Cinema 4D R17+.
The software is sold subscription-only online. Corona Solo subscriptions cost $53.90/month or $358.80/year. Corona Premium subscriptions cost $67.90/month or $478.80/year.
See features currently planned for Corona 10 in the software’s Trello roadmap